I think the answer to Dave's question should have been, "Very carefully.":-)

It's good to see that Marc Esserman continues to enrich/entertain folks at the club. Some time back, Marc provided insightful comments when Larry Eldridge and I were conducting a postmortem of our just-finished game.

After Marc meandered off, Larry asked me who that masked man was. That was not just any masked man, I related, that was an IM.

A similar thing happened when Kyle Clayton and I were engaged in our postmortem some years back. I was pretty deeply engrossed in what had been a complicated game, and didn't look up when another voice started contributing various variations. I could soon tell, however, that whoever belonged to that voice was a pretty darn strong player. I would subsequently learn that the masked man was IM Satea Husari.

Kind of nice, getting unsolicited IM comments. Just another day at the Boylston Chess Club....:-)

Esserman has given me countless free lessons just for being willing to listen attentively. This kind of selfless sharing of knowledge is just typical of the man, who is driven in everything he does by a deep and often fanatical love for the game's purity. He's a total class act and I vacillate between being sickened and amused by the lack of respect he gets from the chess "powers that be."